July 30th, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
Continuing on from Part 1, in this post I’ll discuss the Microsoft 2010 Information Worker Demo Exchange VM, the SahrePoint VM’s event logs and potential future improvements to the environment.
Exchange Server Reconfiguration
Tidying up the Exchange server is a much more straight-forward process. In fact, all of the changes that I made are network orientated per the changes made above, so if you are not adding a second NIC or a second fixed IP address on the original internal NIC, these steps aren’t necessary.
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Performance, SharePoint, Virtualisation | 
No Comments »
July 29th, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
Around the time that Microsoft released the public beta of SharePoint 2010 they also released a demonstration virtual machine, known as the 2010 Information Worker Virtual Machine, which was updated to RTM in mid-June. This is a fantastic resource for demonstrating SharePoint 2010. The content and demonstration scenarios (including walk-throughs) represent a huge investment from Microsoft and it would be foolish not to at least evaluate these assets. Personally, I think it’s silly to reinvent this wheel.
Now the public beta trial is expiring and people are moving to the RTM build. It appears to be much improved, in that more of the product works in this version and a few niggles have been fixed now. However, it’s widely acknowledged that the resource requirements for this virtual machine are gargantuan due to the breadth of what it offers.
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Performance, SharePoint, Virtualisation | 1 Comment »
July 28th, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
As promised in my SharePoint 2010 SEO Analysis with the IIS SEO Toolkit post, while the IIS.NET SEO Toolkit does an excellent job of generating an initial sitemap and providing a nice GUI for ad hoc updates, it does not offer any obvious scheduling mechanism to ensure that your sitemap stays current with the changing content in your CMS. Thankfully, my colleague Glyn Clough whipped up some PowerShell to produce a full sitemap for your web application based on Jie Li’s initial script, which was scoped at the root web. Running this as a Windows scheduled task will get you a very up-to-date sitemap for all sites in your web application with very little on-going maintenance. Nice one Glyn!
IT Management, SharePoint | No Comments »
July 21st, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
Unfortunately I’ve found a problem with our development build, or rather, with SharePoint 2010. You may notice that the Usage and Health Data Collection Proxy is Stopped after deploying it in your environment. This is not just a matter of starting the service like it is with some Service Applications. In this case the SA proxy itself appears to be stopped. It appears that this is a known problem when provisioning this Service Application via the GUI. In fact, ours was created automatically as part of the Search Service Application creation process. At any rate, it doesn’t work in its current state in our environments, so it won’t actually collect any data.
To fix this just requires a couple of lines of PowerShell, courtesy of this article (to which I’ve added some clarification here).
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IT Management, SharePoint | No Comments »
July 7th, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
The IIS.NET Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit provides a powerful analysis tool that can generate reports for web editors and can automatically generate sitemaps and robots.txt files as well. These reports not only provide insight in to page rank improvements but also help content editors identify missing/duplicate content and find broken links. This post provides an overview of how the tools can be used by content editors or web managers who do not have access to the server infrastructure and what you can expect to see when running an SEO Analysis against an out of the box SharePoint 2010 Publishing site. I will also review the server tools that generate sitemaps and robots.txt files.
Installing the SEO Toolkit
Although Remote Server Administration Tools can be installed on Windows Vista and Windows 7, I have produced the directions below on my Windows Server 2008 R2 desktop. The instructions should be fundamentally the same for any OS once IIS Manager is available locally, however it is installed. To be crystal clear, the SEO Toolkit can be used by anyone with Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2. It is not a requirement to have access to the web server and it is not necessary to install IIS locally.
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Client applications, Performance, SharePoint | 2 Comments »
July 6th, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
I’ve just finished watching Virtual PC Guy’s TechEd video on the forthcoming Dynamic Memory update for Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. The beta release of the service pack is due in July. The video is fairly lengthy, at around 80 minutes, but is well worth a watch if you’re interested and find the time. If not, here’s a round-up: read more »
Virtualisation, Windows | 1 Comment »
July 5th, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
In the lead-up to our SharePoint 2010 website launch I’ve been doing a fair amount of research in to the SEO Tools that work with SharePoint. We’ve been looking at automatic/scheduled generation of sitemaps, robots.txt management and conversion of 302 (temporary) to 301 (permanent) redirects. There are a couple of approaches to tackling the first two issues, which I’ll discuss in my next post, but this last issue is more peculiar to SharePoint, as you will have noticed if you’ve ever looked at Fiddler when you browse to the root of a path. For instance, if I browse to the root of my http://publishing/ publishing site I will be automatically redirected to http://publishing/Pages/default.aspx. On a blank site template I would be redirected from http://blank/ to http://blank/default.aspx. In each case SharePoint issues a 302 temporary redirect from the root of the path to the default page. This is not optimal for search on the internet, so many people have tried to rewrite the URL using the IIS URL Rewrite module. Unfortunately, “rewrites” are not supported with SharePoint but I have never seen this explained clearly. To clarify, this is what we’re talking about:
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SharePoint | No Comments »
June 21st, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
I couldn’t face the CSS so I went back to my old theme, which seems to work fine in WordPress 3.0. I’ll have another look in a few months once people have had some time to update old themes and create some new ones for the new framework.
Miscellaneous | No Comments »
June 21st, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
I’ve just put my cowboy hat on and did a WordPress 2.9.x -> 3.0 automatic upgrade (after backing up the database with the WordPress Database Backup plug-in). It completed very quickly and the site seems to be running much faster now. The theme will take some time to get right but I opted to put the new Twenty Ten default theme in place because the layout options are nice and I wanted to get to grips with it ASAP. So far so good. All of the old functionality seemed to keep working, even though much of it is not 3.0 certified yet. I just needed to replace my widgets after switching to the new theme, but that was expected/normal. The cowboy hat’s back in storage again now until I decide to do some other ill-advised stuff upgrade my music site.
Miscellaneous | No Comments »
May 28th, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
I was recently working with a Hyper-V VM that had a large branch of snapshots that I wanted to clean up, in order to conserve disk space. This was a SharePoint 2010 development VM which I’d configured specifically for a project, so I didn’t need all of the earlier snapshots. The environment has two VMs (one domain controller, everything else on the other), so I deleted all of the snapshots that I needed to get rid of on the first VM, one-by-one. From previous experience I knew that I could delete multiple snapshots before the initial merge operation completed. Hyper-V creates a queue of the merge operations that need to complete before the virtual machine can be restarted again. I left myself with only the latest snapshot and moved on to the second virtual machine to do the same. At this point I got a little too clever and started deleting the second snapshot before the first snapshot deletion was queued. It usually only takes a few seconds to complete but I jumped the gun and Hyper-V Manager threw two errors (4096 and 16410) regarding Virtual Machine file access when I tried to delete the second snapshot.
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Virtualisation | 2 Comments »
